While we search for the antidote or the medicine to cure us, the new, that which can only be found in the unknown, we must continue to turn to sex, books, and travel, even knowing they will lead us into the abyss, which, as it happens, is the only place we can find the cure.
— Roberto Bolaño (via predatorywaspobserver)
untitled (union square, new york) circa 1935 by eudora welty
writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists. -eudora welty
“These are not diaries, but contain ideas for short stories and novels, some poems, notes on countries and cities I have visited, people I have met. At very back of these cahiers, quotations I copied out from other writers, etc.” Patricia Highsmith: “Inventory of hardcover first editions at Highsmith house, Dec. 1987”
Just a few days ago, I was running my fingers over my copy of Strangers on a Train, thinking of how I’d like to read some more Patricia Highsmith once finals were over, just absolutely lose myself in one of her thrillers, maybe finally get around to her short stories. This morning over tea, I read this review of a new biography about Highsmith which seems to deliver on all the things I’d previously heard about the famously shut-in writer. I’ve long fascinated been by Highsmith, having read Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley in quick succession over one summer as a teenager. A few years later, I found my interest in her reignited as I learned that she is one of writer Joey Comeau’s (of A Softer World fame) favorite writers.
I love her antiheroes, her amoral creations who not only pique our interest but make us question our own standards. With the aforementioned Ripley, as with many of her other characters, she blurs the lines of sexuality and decency, creating characters who cannot be clearly classified as traditionally good or evil but who intrigue us nonetheless. Highsmith herself was a fascinating creature, her own encounters and relationships with women inspiring her writing, specifically her groundbreaking lesbian novel, The Price of Salt. She began as a writer of superhero comics, an idea that fascinates me as a lover of comics. My mind fills with the possibilities of the things that Patricia Highsmith might have created in a graphic novel.
As, if not more, interesting as the characters she created, Highsmith lived a chaotic life, described as difficult and caustic by her closest friends. She was a misanthrope with a soft spot for animals and a sharp eye for the ugliest truth in humans. She died alone, a fact not shocking when you consider her personality; Highsmith considered this a a byproduct of her chosen profession. She once said, “I have Graham Greene’s telephone number, but I wouldn’t dream of using it. I don’t seek out writers because we all want to be alone.” As I sit at my desk editing a story, I wonder if that’s true.
Author Cormac McCarthy, 76, talked about love, religion, his 11-year-old son, the end of the world and the movie based on his novel ‘The Road.’ He was just getting going.
Hey. The seldom-interviewed McCarthy chatting away here. Read.
The novelist Roberto Bolaño died in 2003. What follows is an excerpt from his last interview, published in Playboy Mexico the month of his death and now appearing in English in “Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview & Other Conversations” (Melville House Publishing), which goes on sale November 23rd. The interview was conducted by Monica Maristain and translated by Sybil Perez. (It is also reprinted in the current issue of Stop Smiling, though not available online.)
Monica Maristain: If you hadn’t been a writer, what would you have been?
Roberto Bolaño: I would like to have been a homicide detective, much more than being a writer. I am absolutely sure of that. A string of homicides. I’d have been someone who could come back to the scene of the crime alone, by night and not be afraid of ghosts. Perhaps then I might really have become crazy. But being a detective that could easily be resolved with a bullet to the mouth. …
That is what is wrong with cold people. Not that they have ice in their souls - we all have a bit of that - but that they insist every word and deed mirror that ice. They never learn the beauty or value of gesture. The emotional necessity. For them, it is all honesty before kindness, truth before art. Love is art, not truth. It’s like painting scenery.
— Lorrie Moore, Self-Help: Stories
RICHMOND, Va. — Edgar Allan Poe took good care of his corpses. They are neatly cut up and craftily stowed beneath floorboards (“The Tell-Tale Heart”); they are walled into ancient catacombs where nothing is likely to disturb their well-earned eternal slumber (“The Cask of Amontillado”); they are encased in coffins that somehow permit them to emerge to take care of unfinished business (“The Fall of the House of Usher”). But the living — some of whom become those corpses — have a much harder time of it. They obsess, brood and hate; they are possessed by bizarre impulses; they wrestle with inchoate forces and often succumb, scarcely knowing the scope of their perversities.
That has pretty much been the fate of Poe as well. This year is the bicentennial of his birth, and while he never earned a secure living, was often sucked into alcoholic maelstroms, was unable to hold a job without incinerating his prospects and regularly lashed out at his literary contemporaries — while in life, in other words, he was a miserable conglomeration of self-justification, remorse, genius, fury and failure — as a corpse he has flourished mightily. And not just because of his inventive creations of the modern detective novel, horror tale and science-fiction story. Contemporary Goth subcultures feed on the themes that ooze from Poe’s work. And celebrations have been widespread and plentiful. …
It is August, 1948 and a young woman in a small New England town is preparing to leave home. She is nineteen years old and she is hopelessly, desperately in love. Tonight, she is ready, and after weeks of clandestine planning, she is going to elope. And everything is about to change.
Page from Anne Sexton’s scrapbook; continue reading here.
It is August, 1948 and a young woman in a small New England town is preparing to leave home. She is nineteen years old and she is hopelessly, desperately in love. Tonight, she is ready, and after weeks of clandestine planning, she is going to elope. And everything is about to change.
Page from Anne Sexton’s scrapbook; continue reading here.
It is August, 1948 and a young woman in a small New England town is preparing to leave home. She is nineteen years old and she is hopelessly, desperately in love. Tonight, she is ready, and after weeks of clandestine planning, she is going to elope. And everything is about to change.
Page from Anne Sexton’s scrapbook; continue reading here.
Four volumes hand-bound by Virginia Woolf.
Authors’ libraries held at the Ransom Center include those of W. H. Auden, the Coleridge family, E. E. Cummings, Guy Davenport, J. Frank Dobie, Arthur Conan Doyle (spiritualism and criminology), Alice Corbin Henderson, James Joyce, Oliver La Farge, Wyndham Lewis, Sir Compton Mackenzie, Christopher Morley, Ezra Pound, Anne Sexton, C. P. Snow, Ron Sukenick, and Evelyn Waugh. There are also collections of books that belonged to English composer Michael Tippett and the Herschel family of astronomers. In addition to providing the authors’ own copies of their works, these libraries offer insight into the owners’ reading and collecting habits. Many copies are annotated by their owners or inscribed to them by prominent friends.
